Hair Spray Dilemas

I thought my days of buying hair spray were over. It’s funny how something comes back when you thought it was long gone. When I was in high school, the hair bands were all the rage, and this meant that everyone had really big hair. At the time, my hair was shorter than it is now, and I had the front feathered back, as a lot of girls my age did. This meant a daily routing of blow drying, hot curling irons, and tons of hair spray just to get out of the house.

After I went to college, the ritual continued. My dad called to thank me for going to college because there was no longer a lacquered layer of hair spray on his wall. I guess I never realized that the stuff didn’t only go on my hair. It also went all over everything behind me in the bathroom. I told him I’d come home for Christmas break and spray the bathroom for him, just for old times sake.

The first few months in college were a change for me, however, as most people experience this. I was introduced to a whole new style of music that instantly grabbed my attention. I was tired of the hair bands, and the image they produced. I never realized how inadequate I felt watching the girls in all of those videos. I wanted something different, and I found the music that was coming out of Seattle at the time as a refreshing change. With this change came other changes. I no longer wanted big hair, and my hair spray was suddenly something that wasn’t being used as much.

I wanted to see what I could do different with my hair. I have natural curls, so it takes a while for it to grow out. It was as long as my shoulders, but I wanted it to grow longer. I also started growing out my bangs. Though I had to use hair spray to keep it out of my eyes for a while, I soon found that I stopped using it all together. For the health of my hair, I also stopped blow-drying it every day, and tried to let my natural curls be, well, natural. Besides, with curls like mine, they don’t need much help being big. Now I was trying to get them to lie down.

I thought my days of worrying about hair spray were over at this point, but now, ten years later, bottles of it are appearing in my house again. My husband is in a band, and he needs his hair to stand up. His weapons of choice are Aussie gel and hair spray. I laugh when I look at the bottles of hair spray he has bought, and I have prepared myself to do a lot of wall scrubbing.